Scrabble vs. Scrabulous, in the era of Facebook

by Anjali Gupta

Scrabulous.com , launched by brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla from Calcutta is set for a battle with the makers of Scrabble, Hasbro who are trying to shut it down.

The question in my mind is – why now? The website has been around since 2006. It was later followed by a Facebook application in early 2007. What changed things at Hasbro? Was the magic number 600,000 registered Scrabulous users or 2.3 million active users on Facebook? What was going on at Hasbro as they sat watching the growth of Scrabulous over the years? Here’s one possibility.

If I were an evil genius running a board games company whose product line spanned everything from Monopoly to Clue, I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win! If I were compassionate, I’d even cut in the guys who did all the work for a percentage point or two to keep the site running.

Either way, evil or compassionate, I would do everything in my power to make sure the Scrabble loving population of the world continues to grow. Why make it a case of board players vs. online players? If the next generation of Scrabble players is meant to be online, so be it. I would not waste my time fighting it, rather spend my time figuring out how to make it viable. Shutting down the online version will move the online audience elsewhere. After all, Scrabulous was created only because the free website Quadplex where the Agarwalla brothers played Scrabble started charging its users.

What game or version of the game will this move by Hasbro create? We’ll just have to wait, watch and later play 🙂

You’re right Anon. EA has the license and it is clearly a violation to proceed without having the legal stuff in place. However, I’m curious why Hasbro did not check the license violations earlier. One year ago, they could have sent a notice to Scrabulous if they wanted to protect it.

It is not new that unlicensed products continue to serve small markets and remain unnoticed. The big players only notice ( license violations ) when these small players start grabbing a larger market share and come on their radar.

I have a game which is available at all leading toy shops and chain stores by the name Squbit and working on the development of an electronic version and go online. Squbit word game patent is applied for and must say this will kill scrabble eventually in the word game market. any one interested in working with us to develope the online version has scope for being the 4th partner or a one time fee. this game combines english with mathematical skills of squaring and cubing hence the name squbit. to kow more type squbit on the net .

I have tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to down load scrabble from the net. Problem is i recently bought a laptop with Windows Vistas on it. Vistas does not take kindly to any pirated/ unofficial software. Does anybody know a store in Mumbai preferably the suburbs where i can buy scrabble? I have checked Croma and Cross word Book stores. Hel[p!
Sorry for a very plebian comment